And, of course, I knew I should add:
Tova says to come home safe to her too.
And while I was getting it all out in the open, I remembered…
Also, I never thanked you for the rose you left in my truck the other day while I was in town. You didn’t have to, and that’s what made it so special. Knowing you were thinking about me.
I almost typedI love you. I didn’t want to say that for the first time through a text. But I was going to damn well say it to his face tonight.
I sent it and put the phone down. I didn’t wait for a reply.
I turned off the burner and covered the pan. I’d finish when Logan got home. Right now, I wanted to go over the loan paperwork from Isaac one more time before we signed it at the notary.
It took me a while to look through it, but everything seemed in order. This was going to work. It was all going to work.
I took a shower, singing the whole time. I walked back into the kitchen, knowing Logan would be home soon. I looked out the window into the darkness and could see a glow from the barn. I must have left the aisle light on after evening chores.
My financial problems might not be so dire anymore, but that didn’t mean I wanted to waste electricity. I grabbed my jacket off the hook by the door, slipped on my boots, and headed out.
I walked toward the barn. The gravel was cool under my boots and the air had the first edge of night in it, and I thought about the rest of the week’s schedule. I had a training client and a new dog coming in. I also needed to confirm that birthday party for next month and get the offering of birthday parties up as an official part of the Pawsitive website.
I pushed open the barn door and walked the aisle. Duchess was in her stall, ears forward, watching me with her standardexpression of measured disapproval. Duke was curled in his kennel with his nose tucked under his tail. The goats were scattered around the spread hay with Snowball closest to the front of the pen. The rabbits, the ferrets, even Clarence with his cursing commentary were silent. Frank’s snoring was the only noise filtering through the space.
The barn held the warm, heavy feel of animals at rest. Every living thing in its place, safe and settled for the night.
The way it should be.
I hit the light switch at the end of the aisle and walked back through the dark. I could hear them breathing around me, shifting in their stalls and kennels, the sounds of a place that was still mine.
I stepped outside and pulled the barn door closed. Turned and stopped.
Carter was standing between me and the house.
My body locked. The flinch I’d buried for years ran through me, and I involuntarily stepped backward and pressed into the closed barn door. He was ten feet away. No idling car with headlights on in the drive, no parked car in the lot. Nothing visible but him. He was just there, standing in my yard in the last of the daylight, and everything warm about this evening evaporated.
He’d been on the phone just a short time ago. He’d saidI won’t call you again.
He hadn’t made an argument to keep me on the phone. He hadn’t needed to—he was already here.
“Don’t run, Eleanor. It will be much worse if you do.”
The hell I wouldn’t. I turned for the tree line. If I could only reach it before— His hand closed around my arm before I made it three steps, and he jerked me back. He spun me into him with a grip that sent pain lancing into my shoulder. His other handroughly covered my mouth, and I was looking up at him from just inches away.
He looked wrong. The Carter I knew was immaculate, every detail managed. This Carter had shadows under his eyes and a looseness in his jaw that I’d never seen, and something behind his eyes had come untethered.
“There’s no one here, Eleanor. I saw your boyfriend leave,” he said. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
He twisted my arm behind my back and pushed me across the yard in front of him, away from the house, toward the back of the property. I fought his grip, and it made no difference. He had sixty pounds on me, and he was holding my arm at an angle that punished every attempt to twist free.
He’d parked his car on the access road along the south boundary, pulled off into the grass where it couldn’t be seen from the house or the county route. He’d known exactly where to put it. He and those damned drug runners could’ve compared notes.
He opened the passenger door and shoved me in. “Don’t fight me, Eleanor. You’ll just end up hurt.”
I bit back a cry of pain as he grabbed both my hands and jerked them toward him. The zip tie bit into my wrists as he cinched it tight, and then he was in the driver’s seat and the doors were closed and we were sitting in silence with the car pointed toward the barn.
“I didn’t want it to go this way, Eleanor.” His hand settled on my left forearm, just above the tie. He wasn’t squeezing, just holding, the way he used to hold my wrist at dinner parties, his fingers wrapped around the bone, letting every person at the table know I was his. “I tried everything. I tried to be patient. I tried to be understanding. I tried to give you the space to figure it out on your own.”
“Let me go, Carter. What we had is over.”
